Opinion: Planetary Scale Information Transmission in the Biosphere and Technosphere: Limits and Evolution

Information transmission via communication between agents is ubiquitous on Earth, and is a vital facet of living systems.

In this paper, we aim to quantify this rate of information transmission associated with Earth’s biosphere and technosphere (i.e., a measure of global information flow) by means of a heuristic order-of-magnitude model.

By adopting ostensibly conservative values for the salient parameters, we estimate that the global information transmission rate for the biosphere might be ∼1024 bits/s, and that it may perhaps exceed the corresponding rate for the current technosphere by ∼9 orders of magnitude.

However, under the equivocal assumption of sustained exponential growth, we find that information transmission in the technosphere can potentially surpass that of the biosphere ∼90 years in the future, reflecting its increasing dominance.

Manasvi Lingam, Adam Frank and Amedeo Balbi
Life 2023, 13(9), 1850; DOI: 10.3390/life13091850
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/13/9/1850
Astrobiology